In a continuing effort to improve the quality of shipping fruits, I, the inventor, typically hybridize a large number of peach, nectarine, plum, apricot, and cherry seedlings each year. I also grow a lesser number of open pollinated seeds of each of these fruits. The present invention relates to a new and distinct variety of interspecific tree, which has been denominated varietally as ‘PLUMRED I’.
During a typical blooming season I select for some seed parents individual plum trees and place bouquets inside the tree perimeter to provide pollen. The bouquets are selected from different plum, apricot, and interspecific plum-apricot hybrid trees and are replaced approximately every two days for the duration of the bloom. During 2001 I selected an unnamed plum seedling, “36P645” (unpatented), as a seed parent and cross pollinated it using selected bouquets from several sources of apricot and interspecific plum-apricot hybrid trees without keeping specific written details. Upon reaching maturity the fruit from this plum tree was harvested, and the seeds were removed, cracked, stratified and germinated as a group with the label “36P645(OP)”. They were grown as seedlings on their own root in my greenhouse and upon reaching dormancy transplanted to a cultivated area of my experimental orchard located near Le Grand, Calif. in Merced County (San Joaquin Valley). During the summer of 2004 the claimed variety was selected by me as a single plant from the group of seedlings described above. Subsequent to origination of the present variety of interspecific tree, I asexually reproduced it by budding and grafting in the experimental orchard described above, and such reproduction of plant and fruit characteristics were true to the original plant in all respects. The reproduction of the variety included the use of ‘Nemaguard’ (unpatented) rootstock upon which the present variety was compatible and true to type.
The present variety is similar to ‘YUMMYrosa’ (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 13,476) plum by being self-unfruitful and by producing fruit that is clingstone in type and that matures in late June, but is distinguished therefrom by producing fruit that is firmer in texture, that has a higher amount of red skin color, that is entirely red to pink in flesh color, and that is larger in size.